Instagram, the social network of the moment, is a platform that allows us to create many types of content but, yes, with certain limits. Especially we find them when uploading videos, since they cannot last as long as we would like on many occasions. But this is going to end after you read this article. We explain how you can upload longer videos to your Instagram account , either to Stories or in your own publications.
How long can an Instagram video last?
Surely you have asked yourself this question on occasion and the answer is somewhat confusing, it depends.
It is not the same that you want to publish a video on your Instagram stories, a direct or a post on your feed. The maximum duration that a video published on this social network can have is:
- Stories : 15 seconds.
- Reels : 15 seconds, with as many clips as you want inside.
- Feed : 60 seconds.
- IGTV : a maximum of 10 minutes for “normal” users and up to 1 hour for verified profiles.
Now that it is clear what is the maximum accepted by this social network, surely the question will cross your mind of and these limits cannot be overcome in some way? And the truth is that yes, but with some caveats since we can only do it in the publications of our feed or in the Instagram stories .
How to upload long videos to Instagram stories
Let’s start with the most typical place where, depending on each user, you may publish videos on a daily basis: the stories.
The truth is that this is the easiest limit to overcome as long as the maximum duration goes from 15 seconds to 1 minute in total . We can do this process in two different ways. Through Instagram it will be as simple as:
- Open the publication panel of the stories as you normally would.
- Whether you keep the record button pressed without releasing it at any time or if you use the “Hands-free” tool that you will find on the left panel, you can record 4 stories in series that, added together, will reach one minute of video.
- Once recorded, you can edit them separately and apply the same effect so that together they look like a single video of longer duration.
However, we can do the same through our phone’s own camera app :
- Open this application and go to the video recording section. Now you just have to capture what you want to say and then post it on Instagram stories. Of course, you must be aware that this clip does not last more than 1 minute , since everything that is outside of it will not be published in your stories.
- With the video already recorded and saved in your gallery, enter the section for publishing your stories.
- Once here, swipe up on your screen to display the content of your gallery. Select that video you just recorded.
- Completely automatically, Instagram will divide your video into 4 stories of 15 seconds each.
Now, if you want to publish a video of more than 1 minute in the stories, things get a little more complicated. But you can be calm, it is not impossible.
On this occasion, the process requires us to divide the video into 15-second clips before uploading them to this social network. And this will be possible thanks to third-party applications designed just for this.
The operation of these applications is the same in all cases: we enter the video in question that we want to divide, the app processes it and, after a few seconds, lets us save all the 15-second clips produced after the division. Most of the applications that offer this service are paid (yes, they are not too expensive) and, in the case of the free ones, most will add a small watermark for which we will have to pay to remove it. The most interesting applications , both for Android and iOS, that will allow us to do this are the following:
Once the division is made, we will only have to go to the stories section, swipe up to access the content of the gallery and select these clips to publish them in order as stories.
How to upload long videos to Instagram feed
The case of the videos in the feed posts is practically identical to that of the Instagram stories, since what we will need is to divide the video before publishing it into parts of 1 minute maximum.
To do this, we can do it through the same applications discussed in the previous section. When cutting the video, in addition to the 15-second divisions, they give us the possibility to choose other times, such as 60 seconds.
With the video already sectioned in units of 1 minute maximum, we enter Instagram and follow the following steps:
- Access the profile publication menu. This is to the left of the publications section.
- Click on the icon of the two stacked squares that you can see on the content of your gallery. This gives us the possibility to publish more than one element as a carousel or gallery .
- Select all the 1-minute cuts in your video and follow the normal posting process.
In this way, you will be able to publish a video of a maximum of 10 minutes , reaching the limit of 10 posts in a carousel that allows us to use this social network. Although the truth is that, if you want to make such a long post, it may be more comfortable to do it through IGTV .